Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out to people who feel like they will lose some of their business. However, a group of developers has shown what was always true about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always going to be reproducible and remixable.
The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way and that's just very standard in art history. People went crazy when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g. something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing digital art in the way that Warhol's practice was a system for producing visual art as a commercial product.
Indeed, I'll get worried when DALL-E gets sick of everything it has seen, and comes up with something that's new, and maybe not even very good at first, but perseveres until it's recognized as important. All, while earning its living in some soul sucking day job.
I'd actually love to see DALL-E take on the greeting card industry. Now that would be fun.
I literally just made a greeting card with DALL-E. Generated the image I wanted and had the card printed and posted to the recepient for no more than buying a pre-exisiting card. Advantage here is that this image concept, which was very tailored to the person, didn't exist anywhere in any form.
I think you're wrong. Pretty much all human creations can be encoded digitally to a high enough fidelity that the discretization process no longer is distinguishable.
And 3D printers for paintings exist, that can replicate brush strokes and other techniques, and they will only get better over time.
So there's very little left in the human arsenal as the AI generation and AI painting techniques both improve.
Oke I see what you mean, but isn't that just a reproduction in physical form? They have Warholised painting with 3D printers by creating a systematic method to reproduce art using a new combination of craft. I like it but it's not a totality.
I can bring up a form of art that is not captured by this conceptual scheme. Carsten Holler's SOMA:
The exhibition Soma was installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2010. Its main element were 12 reindeer in two pens running the length of the former railway station. Half of the reindeer were fed the fly agaric mushrooms in their food, which are part of their customary diet in the wild, and turn their urine into a hallucinogen. The reindeer urine was collected by handlers and then stored in on-site refrigerators for use. The experiment was extended to canaries, which were housed in two hanging cage pieces, to mice, and to flies. A mushroom-shaped Elevator Bed was installed in the middle of the space, and visitors could spend the night on the premise for a fee.
Do you see what I mean by this digital art vis a vis the collapse of all art being an overreaction? Carsten Holler is a real artist, the art is good, and its not reproducible in the way digi-physical stuff is. It's experiential art and presented in a gallery. Conceptually, its about as far away from DALLE-E as possible but its still art and not "captured". I think art is not over and DALL-E is not poison for artists.
The kind of art you're talking about is "high art" and it's a luxury item. The majority of artists don't produce that type of art, and will instead lose out in this scenario.
A Ferrari is a luxury item. The exhibition was free but you could pay to stay the night. The guy also designs slides and the tone of his exhibition style is not "high art".
Ultimately you are talking about art as a product and that means you think all art is captured by Warhol's system of art. Which is what all digital artists overreacting to this also think. It's not the totality of what art is. I like DALL-E. Good work, but now what else is there beyond digital art? Or by pushing digital art to some more extreme outcome?
Technical artists are far different from performance or exhibitionist artists. They aren't even in the same realm.
Yeah, art is vast. It includes me saying "Kerflaffle!!" while I ride a unicycle and fart out a candle in a dimly lit room. But that doesn't usually pay bills and most artists don't do this type of art. It serves a different audience/consumer. It has a different market cap. Let's not confuse oranges and grapefruit.
Your link shows you can 3D print a "Rembrandt" if you hire a team of people to spend 18 months working on custom algorithms for it, and I doubt any art experts were as likely to actually be fooled by it as they were by a van Meergeren forgery.
Not sure the people selling paintings knocked out in an afternoon to tourists who visited their studio and chose to buy an original instead of the visually indistinguishable print for a fraction of the price have much to worry about...
Everything is originally bespoke before it is mass produced. Forgeries have gotten so much better than they used to be. I know antique dealers and they often rant about the job of recognizing reproductions having become significantly more difficult.
Like others have said, the first ones have issues, but late stage is when things get problematic.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Reproducibility has virtually nothing to do with interest in my opinion. I was an admirer of plenty of artists before I'd ever seen their work in person. Perhaps I am missing the point.
I mean it in the sense that using digital technologies to produce art is not always going to be interesting. I don't mean that I will never find any digital art interesting though. Distilled to one point: DALL-E does not wholesale capture any rational definition of art reflecting actual art history.
I think DALL-E is a win-win by pushing digital art to some further extreme and forcing people who are open to art beyond the digital to try new things. Digital art had reached a point of maximum inertia before this imo.
Do you seriously want to go down the 'This is not art' path? That battle has been lost so many times for different forms of art that are much harder to 'get' for most people.
Also, since you like to emphasize the 'digital' part of these works, don't forget we're probably not much further than one Master-level project for some mechanical engineering students from having AI-generated physical paintings.
Ah, I see what you mean, as in digital creation is just another in a long line of technologies used for art creation, and at some point will just be mundane? I agree completely with that.
Yeah and it'll evolve unexpectedly but not in a way that most artists can't adapt to or develop a practice with. I just don't agree with the idea that DALL-E is art poison. That's overly simplistic and reactionary and not realistic about the diversity of form, materials, composition in artworks.
The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way and that's just very standard in art history. People went crazy when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g. something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing digital art in the way that Warhol's practice was a system for producing visual art as a commercial product.